Update: Facebook CSO Alex Stamos tweeted the following on Monday evening in the wake of The New York Times report:

Despite the rumors, I'm still fully engaged with my work at Facebook. It's true that my role did change. I'm currently spending more time exploring emerging security risks and working on election security.

One of the less appealing aspects of the twice-yearly Windows 10 feature updates is that they're slow to install and, for most of the installation process, your PC is out of commission, doing nothing more than displaying a progress indicator.

Thanks to a new upgrade process, the next update—expected to be released in April—should result in substantially less downtime. The install process is split into two portions: the "online" portion, during which your PC is still usable, and the "offline" portion after the reboot, during which your PC is a spinning percentage counter.

Microsoft estimates that the Creators Update, released almost a year ago, would take about 82 minutes on average during the offline phase. Improvements made in the Fall Creators Update cut that to about 51 minutes, and the next update (which still hasn't actually been blessed with an official name) will cut this further still, to just 30 minutes.

The project aims to put thousands of solar panels and batteries on South Australian homes, starting with public Housing Trust properties, to create a 250MW distributed "power plant," which can respond to grid signals and isolate itself (or "island") during outages. The project would have received a AU$2 million (US$1.54 million) grant from the state, as well as AU$30 million (US$23.16 million) in state-backed loans.

Marshall's objection to the project seems to be rooted in its structure rather than in a blanket opposition to energy storage. On Monday, when a reporter asked Marshall about the plan to outfit Housing Trust homes with solar panels and batteries, he replied, "That's not part of our agenda. Our agenda is 40,000 homes." The 40,000 homes is a reference to Marshall's plan to put up $100 million in subsidies to offer a $2,500 grant on each battery storage unit installed at 40,000 homes.

While Samsung's newest flagship, the Galaxy S9, is just hitting the market, last year's flagship, the Galaxy S8, is getting some love, too. Samsung and its US carrier partners are finally upgrading the Galaxy S8 to Android 8.0 Oreo, a version of the OS that came out six months ago.

Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint are all pushing out the update now, with no word yet on updates for the AT&T or unlocked US version.

Most of Google's engineering efforts on Android 8.0 came in the form of Project Treble, a massive overhaul of the underlying Android bits to modularize the OS away from the hardware, which should lead to easier updates. Due to the complexity of this change, the update is mostly meant for new devices that were built with Oreo in mind, and it's not coming to most upgrading phones. The rest of the changes are nice-to-have things like a revamped notification hierarchy and a lockdown on background processing.

Studies of the bones of dog, large cat, turkey, and other animal bones found in the Maya city of Ceibal show that, as early as 400 BCE, the Mayan elite were importing dogs from distant corners of Guatemala and raising large cats like jaguars in captivity, probably all for use in elaborate rituals at the pyramids in the center of the city.

“Animal trade helped sustain many large civilizations, such as the Romans in Europe, the Inca Empire in South America, the Mesopotamians in the Middle East, and the ancient Chinese dynasties,” said archaeologist Ashley Sharpe of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, who led the study. But at Ceibal, the imported animals seem to have served purely ceremonial or political purposes, which may have played an important role in the growth of the powerful Maya state.

Captive jaguar

The work is based on discoveries at a pyramid near the ceremonial center of Ceibal, an important Maya city in what is now Guatemala (the city is also known as Seibal and El Ceibal). Archaeologists found the jawbone of a large cat—probably a jaguar—mixed in with ancient construction fill. A jawbone doesn’t sound like much, but it’s enough to let archaeologists reconstruct what the animal ate and where it came from. The ratio of stable carbon isotopes stored in the bone, for example, can tell researchers whether the animal or its prey ate a lot of grain or foraged on more woody plants in the forests around Ceibal, while nitrogen isotope ratios reveal the amount of protein in the animal’s diet.

Does language, by providing a way to symbolize and communicate our thoughts, enable us to reason? Or are inference, deduction, and other forms of logical reasoning independent of our ability to put words to them? It’s hard to figure out whether babies can think, given they can’t tell us. Which makes separating language from reasoning even harder.

Ernő Téglás, at the Babylab in Budapest, researches “how infants acquire the conceptual sophistication necessary for abstract combinatorial thought involved in everyday reasoning.” His team has just published work describing the precursors of logical reasoning in pre-verbal infants; one group of infants was aged 12 months and the other was 19 months old. Babies at these ages are just at the cusp of language learning and speech development, but they definitely precede the development of extensive language.

Wrong expectations

Like 20-something adults given the same tests, these babies expressed distress when their deductions did not hold true. Distress came in the form of staring at the inconsistent outcomes, which is how baby cognition is often measured.

Climate science has kind of had its day in court before. In 2007, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that CO2 fits the definition of a pollutant under the Clean Air Act—a decision that forces the US EPA to draw up regulations to tackle climate change, regardless of political winds. But on Tuesday, climate science will literally have its day in court, as a federal judge receives a five-hour tutorial he requested on the subject.

The case pits San Francisco and Oakland against BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil, and Royal Dutch Shell. The cities are alleging that major oil companies sold fossil fuels while knowing their use would change the climate—and, critically, publicly campaigning to convince the public they would not change the climate. As San Francisco and Oakland incur significant costs building infrastructure to protect their cities from sea-level rise, they want oil companies to chip in for the bill.

The case, which would obviously set a huge precedent if the cities won, already seems to have gone further than past attempts. Other judges have booted suits on the grounds that emissions should be regulated by the EPA and therefore the issue can’t be decided in a courtroom. But the specifics of the California case—going after sellers of fossil fuels rather than local users of fossil fuels—convinced Judge William Alsup that it can go forward.

Federal judges have struck down an anti-robocall rule, saying that the Federal Communications Commission improperly treated every American who owns a smartphone as a potential robocaller.

The FCC won't be appealing the court decision, as Chairman Ajit Pai opposed the rule changes when they were implemented by the commission's then-Democratic majority in 2015. Pai issued a statement praising the judges for the decision Friday, calling the now-vacated rule "yet another example of the prior FCC’s disregard for the law and regulatory overreach."

The FCC's 2015 decision said that a device meets the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) definition of an "autodialer" if it can be modified to make robocalls, even if the smartphone user hasn't actually downloaded an autodialing app.

The Pikes Peak International Hill Climb is like little else in motorsport. It's the second-oldest race in the country, giving five years up to the Indy 500. However, this is no circuit race. It's a hill climb, up and across one of the tallest mountains in Colorado. That means exactly one chance to get it right; one run of 12.4 miles (19.99km) that starts at a mere 9,390 feet (2,862m) and finishes above the clouds at 14,110 feet (4,300m).

As part of its Dieselgate penance, Volkswagen is mounting an all-out, all-electric assault on Pikes Peak this June. And, on Monday, the German automaker finally gave us our first look at the car it's going to use: the I.D. R.

Enlarge / SpaceX is likely to build the BFR rocket, and the BFS spaceship shown here on the Moon, near its California headquarters. (credit: SpaceX)

Anyone who has visited SpaceX's rocket factory in Hawthorne, California, knows that the company has filled up its facilities with Falcon 9 first stages, payload fairings, and Dragon capsules. In the coming years, as the company transitions into manufacturing the Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR vehicle, it will need a lot more capacity.

The company has not explicitly stated where it will build the BFR, expected to measure 106 meters tall and nine meters wide. However, it needs to do so near water, because such a large vehicle cannot be transported to the launch pad or test sites via a highway, the means currently used to move the Falcon 9 rocket.

A new document from the Port of Los Angeles indicates that the company is moving ahead with plans to build a "state-of-the-art" industrial manufacturing facility near Long Beach, about 20 miles south of its headquarters. The document summarizes an environmental study of the site for the port, on behalf of a proposed tenant—WW Marine Composites, LLC. This appears to be a subsidiary company of SpaceX.

At GDC, Microsoft announced a new feature for DirectX 12: DirectX Raytracing (DXR). The new API offers hardware-accelerated raytracing to DirectX applications, ushering in a new era of games with more realistic lighting, shadows, and materials. One day, this technology could enable the kinds of photorealistic imagery that we've become accustomed to in Hollywood blockbusters.

Whatever GPU you have, whether it be Nvidia's monstrous $3,000 Titan V or the little integrated thing in your $35 Raspberry Pi, the basic principles are the same; indeed, while many aspects of GPUs have changed since 3D accelerators first emerged in the 1990s, they've all been based on a common principle: rasterization.

Here’s how things are done today

A 3D scene is made up of several elements: there are the 3D models, built from triangles with textures applied to each triangle; there are lights, illuminating the objects; and there's a viewport or camera, looking at the scene from a particular position. Essentially, in rasterization, the camera represents a raster pixel grid (hence, rasterization). For each triangle in the scene, the rasterization engine determines if the triangle overlaps each pixel. If it does, that triangle's color is applied to the pixel. The rasterization engine works from the furthermost triangles and moves closer to the camera, so if one triangle obscures another, the pixel will be colored first by the back triangle, then by the one in front of it.

AUSTIN, Texas—Robots and research during the day, barbacoa and bands at night. South by Southwest may not deliver the product announcements of CES or the in-depth technical analysis of Google I/O or WWDC-types, but Austin's contribution to the tech calendar remains perhaps the most unique annual event on the Ars radar.

The 2018 event only emphasized this. SXSW remains the place where you may decide to check out the Westworld showrunners talking about season two when all of a sudden Elon Musk shows up, Thandie Newton (Mae) reveals her deep passion for improving life in the Congo, and everyone starts discussing how to inspire humanity. Or, you might decide to check out the much-hyped Ready Player One "Oasis" experience only to discover HTC quietly snuck its newest headset iteration in, and you can finally comfortably wear your eyeglasses while gaming.

Apple is reportedly taking a big step into making its own displays, and it isn't using the technology you may be most familiar with. According to a Bloombergreport, a secret facility in California close to Apple Park houses engineers developing microLED displays for Apple mobile devices. While Apple has been making its own chips for its mobile devices for a few years, this would be the first time the company has attempted build its own displays.

MicroLED technology is still in its infancy, particularly in its application in consumer electronics. We last saw microLEDs show up in Samsung's gigantic, 146-inch TV dubbed "The Wall," which it debuted at CES in January. Making microLED displays is no easy task since the panels are made up of individual pixels that need to be individually calibrated. Each pixel is self-emitting as well, meaning microLED displays do not require individual backlights. But, microLEDs produce displays that are incredibly bright, with deep blacks and high contrast ratios, and that are slimmer and don't require as much power as their LCD counterparts.

Due to the complexity of microLED display development and application, Apple is reportedly still in the experimental phases when it comes to these panels. The company reportedly has about 300 engineers working on the initiative, reportedly code-named "T159n" which is being overseen by Lynn Youngs, who helped develop touchscreen display technology for the original iPhone and iPad. Apple also gleaned some intellectual property about microLED development when it acquired the screen-tech startup LuxVue back in 2014.

Game makers looking for inspiration or stock content to use in their Unreal Engine projects now have access to thousands of skins, animations, effects, dialogue snippets, and environment components from Paragon, the company's defunct free-to-play "action MOBA." Epic is making the audio and visual assets from the game available for free use in Unreal Engine projects, with "no strings attached," through its Unreal Engine Marketplace, starting today.

I first met Stephen Hawking in March 2003, when the most famous scientist in the world visited Texas. For a young science reporter at the Houston Chronicle, an invitation to interview Hawking during a stop in College Station rated as a real coup.

Reporters never like to submit their questions to a subject in advance; indeed it is something I often refuse to do. However, with Hawking and his limited ability to communicate, this was a prerequisite. As almost all of his motor skills had atrophied, Hawking used a custom-made computer to form words, which were then spoken through a voice synthesizer. Typically, he could form a short sentence in about five to 10 minutes.

Prior to meeting with him, I asked a number of scientific questions of Hawking. But, after all of these years, the one query, and answer, that sticks with me concerned the hottest issue of the day, the impending Iraq conflict. What did he think about the likelihood of the United States going to war against Iraq?

Enlarge / This headset will give you a much sharper image and a much lighter wallet than the original Vive. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

HTC's higher-resolution Vive Pro, first announced back in January, is setting new records for the price of a mass-market virtual reality headset. In pre-orders starting today ahead of planned April 5 shipments, customers will have to shell out $799 for the improved Vive Pro headset, a price that does not include any controllers or Lighthouse tracking base stations.

While the original Vive also cost $799 when it launched nearly two years ago, that package included two controllers and the two tracking stations necessary for un-occluded, room-scale VR. Existing HTC Vive owners will be able to reuse those accessories if and when they upgrade to the Vive Pro headset. New users, however, will currently have to purchase them à la carte (an HTC representative tells Ars that pricing for a separate "full kit" Vive Pro package will be announced soon).

In the years before (and even some years after) the Game Boy revolutionized the portable gaming market, self-contained, single-serving LCD games were the best electronic gaming-on-the-go many of us could hope for. The Internet Archive has now captured a handful of these proto-examples of portable gaming for play in the Web browser, via MAME-powered emulation.

Station wagons used to be everywhere. My best friend in high school drove some gigantic, late-'60s station wagon in that peculiar color I thought of as "station wagon green" with a healthy helping of faux wood paneling. Throw in a bit of rust, a few inches of fast food wrappers on the floor of the back seat, and a radio capable of cranking out the latest rock hits from KBPI (rocks the Rockies!) from the sole dashboard speaker, and you had... a common and unremarkable ride for the early 1980s.

How time (and tastes) have changed. Once ubiquitous, the station wagon is something of a rare sight on roads now populated by crossovers, SUVs, and minivans. Three decades ago, if you wanted something that could carry kids and a bunch of gear, your choice was either a station wagon or a van. And not the mini kind of van, either. Yet the station wagon is hanging in there—just about—even when there are so many other options. When given the chance to drive one, the Buick Regal TourX with Smart Driver tech, we jumped at the chance.